When it was clear that Microsoft were a threat to computing freedom I started to look for alternatives. I’d tried Linux on an old laptop and it didn’t work and the thought sort of festered for a while. One day during a nerdy perusal of the PC Bookshop in Holborn I saw a book called Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls and bought it. The guy on the counter upsold me an #OpenBSD cd set, telling me it was better than Linux.

So I tried it, liked it and have used it as much as possible ever since. So my standard for Unix-like systems, my normality, is OpenBSD. I expect a man page - not -h or —help. A man page. And I’ve come to expect a well written man page that tells me everything I need to know to use the command.

The problem of being born and living in opulence is that when you find yourself in luxury - it’s a step down. This is my experience with Linux. Yes, it’s better than Windows, but it is still a step down. And tools written for it and then packages for OpenBSD are almost always deficient in documentation. And this takes the shine off some very good tools because they are unusable without two blog posts and three Stack Exchange posts.

I won’t mention the latest package I’ve just faffed about with trying to work out what arguments it requires because the author of the man page didn’t simply add a few examples.

Something for me to do in the next few weeks and see if it gets merged.